New People – Survey results uncover the growth of first-time developers participating in the open source community, and point to both new open source education initiatives and the prevalence of open source-based educational platforms. In addition, the three industries expected to be impacted most by open source were identified as education (76 percent), government (67 percent), and health care (45 percent), demonstrating how entrenched OSS has become to our social fabric.

New Technologies – As data from the Black Duck® KnowledgeBase™ shows, with nearly one million open source projects to date, the rate of innovation is spurring new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the continued rise of Software as a Service (SaaS). When asked what industries open source technology was leading, 63 percent cited cloud computing/virtualization, 57 percent answered content management, 52 percent selected mobile technology, and 51 percent answered security.

New Economics – A change in the way enterprises view open source was signaled by 56 percent of respondents expecting corporations to contribute to more open source projects in 2014. When asked why corporations engaged with OSS communities, cost reduction remanded the top response (61 percent), but gaining competitive advantage came in second (45 percent), and for companies over 1,000 employees, influencing a project’s direction was the third most popular answer.”

Funding Open-Source

Companies like Twitter, Netflix, and Erickson are actually paying developers to participate in their open-source communities.

Crowdfunding is looking more attractive all the time. Popular sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe, the top 3 at the time of this post, have already raised well over a $ billion combined in 2014.